The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  Grand Designs

  The conflict between Europe's warring religions reached its climax with the Armada campaign of 1588, Philip II's grand design. The fleet despatched for the invasion of England was intended to resolve a whole complex of interrelated problems. After twenty years the Revolt of the Netherlands was no closer to resolution; indeed, since 1585 the intervention of English troops had slowed the Spanish advance and seemed to point to a costly military stalemate. Philip II was finally convinced that only if England were eliminated from the conflict could the Dutch rebels be brought to book. The incorporation of the Portuguese Crown in 1580 with its precious ocean-going fleet made a seaborne invasion possible; Philip's alliance with the Catholic League in France neutralised any possible hostile action by the French king. All that was now required was a fair wind to speed the Spanish fleet through the Channel, a successful juncture with the Duke of Parma's troops in Flanders, and the rising of English Catholics that Philip had been promised by enthusiastic exiles and his own London agents.

  7.5 A day that would live in infamy. Twenty years later Christopher Marlowe scored a success on the London stage with this stage version of the massacre, nicely timed to take advantage of a new crisis in French affairs.

  It was impossible for an enterprise on this scale to be kept secret. The English knew what Philip had in store from at least 1586; indeed, a successful sortie into the port of Cadiz in April 1587 helped disrupt preparations sufficiently to force him to postpone the campaign for a year. But once the Armada set sail, Europe entered a period of anxious waiting. While the fleet made its way north, information centres across the continent experienced the equivalent of a news blackout: such snippets as were picked up by passing vessels and returning seamen often turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Even from the point at which the Spanish flotilla was sighted in the Channel, it would be several weeks before its success or failure would be determined. The Armada campaign was thus quite different from the joyful announcement of the distant victory of Lepanto, or the thunderclap of St Bartholomew. This was a rolling news event which occupied most of an anxious summer, where hard news was scarce, and rumour, uncertain reports and speculation filled the vacuum.

  The Armada that left Lisbon at the end of May soon encountered foul weather, and was forced to take refuge in the north Spanish port of Corunna. It set out again only on 21 July. The decisive action against the English took place on 7 and 8 August. Having kept his fleet intact on the passage through the Channel, Admiral Medina Sidonia anchored off Calais to await the juncture with Parma's army. It was here that the English fleet made its move, sending in fireships to force the Spanish ships to scatter. Driven north by strong winds, the Armada headed ever further from the proposed invasion rendezvous. By the end of August there was no hope of a return. The remains of the once proud fleet were left to make a straggling passage around Ireland and back to Spain.35

  For those far from the action this was a long drawn-out summer of waiting. Nowhere was news more anxiously awaited than in Rome. Pope Sixtus V had committed himself heavily to Spanish success, promising Philip a contribution of one million ducats once Spanish troops disembarked on English soil. These were difficult times for newsmen. It was clear how ardently Rome desired to hear good news. Spanish agents in the city were keen to announce the victory that would induce the Pope to release the promised subsidy. The Spanish postmaster, Antonio de Tassis, was heavily engaged in promoting every positive rumour. The avviso of 13 August reported that Tassis had wagered heavily that he would have good news by 20 August: a rumour deliberately planted to sway the markets. The snippets picked up by the merchant networks could also be misleading. Back in July Agostino Pinelli had been exhibiting in Rome letters from Lyon reporting that the Catholic army had arrived in Scotland, and was disembarking there. In August, following further news of an English defeat, the Duke of Parma was obliged to send word that no such report had been received in Antwerp.36

  The commercial avvisi in Rome acquitted themselves well in the Armada campaign. They reported the rumours of Spanish success, but noted that these were unconfirmed reports requiring corroboration. On 16 July the Pinelli bankers received word from France announcing a Spanish triumph, but, noted the avviso, ‘because there is such great desire to believe in a victory it is necessary to wait for confirmation’. The avviso of 26 July reported further glad tidings from Cologne, but also that none of the other couriers had word of it. On 22 August a special courier of the Duke of Savoy arrived in Rome with news of an English defeat, ‘but this will remain in doubt until it is confirmed by other couriers’.37

  The patent scepticism and professionalism of the Rome avvisi did not prevent news of the Spanish victory being widely celebrated in Catholic Europe. A large part of the responsibility for this rests with the Spanish ambassador in Paris, Bernardino de Mendoza, who received and then circulated a sequence of highly misleading reports.38 At the end of July news reached Paris of the battle off the Isle of Wight: fifteen English ships were said to have been sunk. Mendoza sent this news straight to Madrid and made arrangements for an account of the Spanish victory to be published in Paris.39 The English ambassador Sir Edward Stafford countered with his own chronology of events, laying out the course of the battle until the decisive engagement of 8 August. This too was published in French, though no reputable Paris printer was prepared to put his name to it.40 Mendoza was unimpressed. ‘The English ambassador here had some fancy news printed, stating that the English had been victorious,’ he informed King Philip, ‘but the people would not allow it to be sold, as they say it is all lies.’41 Instead Mendoza chose to share with Philip a more optimistic report that Medina Sidonia had worsted and captured Sir Francis Drake. Mendoza's first report arrived in Madrid on 18 August. When the second came on 26 August, Philip was prepared to declare victory. Uncharacteristically, he had it announced by a printed broadsheet. A local English agent reported that the news was greeted with wild public rejoicing.

  Elsewhere it was the same story. On 17 August the Senate of Venice voted to convey their congratulations to King Philip on his great victory. On 20 August in Prague the Spanish ambassador ordered a Te deum to be sung in celebration. But just then a report came in with contradictory news. In Rome it was left to the avvisi to prick the bubble of wishful thinking, as the true extent of the Spanish defeat emerged, beyond the capacity of even the most optimistic to wish away.

  What of the protagonists? England, its treasury badly depleted after three years of warfare in the Netherlands, had staked everything on the success of the navy. The county levies had been raised and drilled, but few had exercised with live firearms. Although the English government was now finally appraised of the essential pivot of Philip's grand design, the juncture of the Armada with Parma's army of the Netherlands, the precise point where the enemy's main force would land was still unknown. Elizabeth believed they would attack through Essex, or sail up the Thames: the county forces were instructed to muster at Brentwood. For all the money spent on Walsingham's intelligence service, around 5 per cent of the Crown's annual revenues, it had not been able to determine that the invasion force was aimed at Kent.42

  Certainly it was a close-run thing. By driving the Armada away from Calais before Parma's troops could embark, the English navy had exploited the weakest point in Philip's plan. By the time Elizabeth travelled downriver to address her forces gathered at Tilbury in Essex (where they would have been badly wrong-footed had the invasion taken place), the Armada had already passed the Firth of Forth, heading away from England. Elizabeth might have had ‘the heart of an Englishman’, but thankfully the military skills of those who heard the Tilbury speech were not to be tested.

  In Spain the full scale of the disaster became clear only gradually. A defensive despatch from Parma, admitting that the juncture with the Armada fleet had not taken place, arrived in Madrid on 31 August. Four days later a courier from France brought news of the fleet's flight northwards. Not surprisingly, there was little appe
tite in the king's inner circle to convey this news to Philip. The choice fell on Mateo Vásquez, but even he preferred to make the communication in writing, sending in to Philip an oblique and rather tactless letter which wrapped the news in a convoluted comparison with Louis IX of France, the sainted king who had nevertheless led his troops to disaster.43 For the Spanish Crown the autumn months were grim, as the tattered remnants of the fleet limped home and ships were confirmed lost. The expedition had cost Spain 15,000 men and around 10 million ducats. Most of all it had cost Philip his reputation as the invincible master of the world's most feared military power. The tectonic plates had shifted, and Philip II's carefully constructed masterplan swiftly disintegrated. The French king Henry III was now emboldened to turn on his persecutors in the Catholic League, and take desperate action to restore his authority. The Duke of Guise and his brother the Cardinal were summoned to the royal palace at Blois, and there done to death by the king's guards.44 The news of their hero's assassination stunned and then enraged Catholic opinion. In France the Catholic League rose in revolt. In foreign capitals governments had to assess what now would be the fate of France, its beleaguered king, and the patient Protestant heir, Henry of Navarre.

  This was a news event to rival even the defeat of the Armada. Guise was assassinated on 23 December 1588. The news was known in Rome on 4 January 1589.45 The following avviso, describing how the news was received, reflects the universal recognition that something of European significance had occurred at Blois:

  7 January. On Wednesday at 10 pm a courier arrived from Blois for the Cardinal Joyeuse, an hour later another from the Duke of Savoy to his ambassador, then a third towards midnight from the Grand Duke of Tuscany with a dispatch from France signed by H. Rucellai. Finally on Thursday a fourth courier arrived for the French Ambassador from the most Christian King. All had the same news: the death of the Duke of Guise.46

  The outraged Pope now excommunicated Henry III, who had little option but to make common cause with Navarre in an attempt to restore his crumbling authority. On 2 August Henry was himself assassinated. The news reached Rome on 16 August, and was reported in the avviso of 23 August. Henry's death was a catastrophe for a number of Rome bankers who were heavily exposed by their lending to the French king. They attempted to cast doubt on the reports. The envoy of the Duke of Urbino therefore sought corroboration, as was his custom, from the Spanish ambassador. The duke's copy of the avviso of 30 August is carefully annotated in the ambassador's own hand:

  The King of France is dead, exactly as people have said. Today there arrived two couriers, one sent by the Bonvisi of Lyon with letters of the 20th, another from Nancy with two letters, from that town of 17th and from Paris dated 8 August. There can be no doubt.47

  In the wake of the Guise assassination the League had occupied both Paris and Lyon, principal news hubs en route from northern Europe to Rome. Navarre responded by sending his own messengers to Rome, to build his case for an amelioration of the perpetual excommunication proclaimed against him.48 By the middle months of 1589 Rome was receiving news from both sides by special courier almost every day. In such highly charged times statesmen were all too aware that the news could be manipulated or become distorted. The avvisi reflected this caution for their customers. Momentous news required confirmation, as was frequently emphasised in the way it was reported:

  22 September 1590. As we hear from Venice, Turin, Lyon, Augsburg, Innsbruck and elsewhere, a battle took place on 27 August between Parma and Navarre, and 15,000 are thought to have been killed. The Pope has the same report from his Nuncio in Venice, while the Spanish Ambassador has received letters from Parma's camp dated 28 August.49

  To the victor, the spoils. The defeat of the Spanish Armada provided the opportunity for a great wave of celebratory pamphleteering, in England, the Netherlands and Germany.50 The vanquished licked their wounds in silence. The presses of Italy, so busy after Lepanto, had little to offer. France was mostly consumed by its own affairs, though the Parisian press did briefly rouse itself to report a Spanish victory off the Orkney Islands as the returning fleet made its long and tortuous way home.51 This again seems to have been largely wishful thinking, though similar reports were clearly circulating in Antwerp.52

  England had been badly shaken by the events of the summer. Preachers spreading blood-curdling rumours that the Spanish planned to kill every man between seven and seventy might have encouraged desperate resistance, or they might have caused morale to collapse altogether. Calls for repentance mixed with invocations of divine favour also risked drawing attention to the ramshackle nature of military preparations. When the Armada achieved its rendezvous with Parma without substantial loss, some began to criticise the admiral's apparent lack of boldness in handling his fleet. But as the scale of the victory became known, all was forgiven. Queen Elizabeth's speech at Tilbury was witnessed by a number of aspiring authors keen to perpetuate its memory. Two agile and enterprising entrepreneurs returned to London and registered ballads celebrating the speech the very next day. These Tilbury ballads were part of a cascade of cheap print as London's often under-employed printers cashed in on the mood of national celebration.53 James Aske, whose Elizabetha Triumphans was an altogether more ambitious literary work, at one point despaired of seeing it printed at all, because ‘of the commonness of ballads’. With the danger now past it was time to mock recent fears. It was widely reported that on board the captured Spanish ships had been found large numbers of whips and leg-irons, clearly to enslave and torment the conquered nation. This was cheerfully satirised in a blood-curdling ballad illustrated with woodcuts of the whips.54

  One of the most subtle pieces of government-sponsored propaganda was an English version of the Spanish pamphlet listing the ships, munitions and men of the Armada.55 The original, printed at the time of the fleet's embarkation in Lisbon, had been republished in French by Mendoza during the summer.56 Now England threw back in his face the battle array of the ‘invincible’ fleet, vanquished by England's mariners and God's will. All told, we can detect a new confidence, wit and polemical flair in the English pamphlet literature of these years, epitomised by A pack of Spanish lies, a typographically subtle piece that presented the Spanish claims of the summer, in a ponderous Gothic type, alongside a corrected narrative in sprightly Roman.57 We are the future now, it seemed to say: thus was false news held up to ridicule. At the beginning of a decade when news of continental wars would consume the London press, England's printers were taking significant steps towards the development of the fully fledged news market that had hitherto eluded them.

  7.6 The might of the Spanish fleet. After its defeat this enumeration of the vessels and their armament was a celebration of English naval prowess.

  The Spider's Web

  The common thread in all three of these instances is the Spanish king, Philip II. He had organised and financed the expedition that had ended with the victory of Lepanto. He was widely suspected of being the evil genius behind the massacre of 1572, particularly (but not exclusively) in Protestant Europe. The Armada of 1588 was to have been the crowning enterprise of his grand design, to save Europe for Catholicism and put his enemies – in England, France and the Low Countries – to flight. Its failure dashed these hopes and condemned Europe to a brutal decade of attritional warfare.

  Philip ruled Spain at the height of its powers. It was Europe's military superpower, its armies paid by the seemingly inexhaustible bullion extracted from the silver mines of Potosí (now in Bolivia) in the viceroyalty of Peru. From 1580 Philip also had at his disposal the resources of Portugal, and especially its deep-water fleet. No wonder that Spanish plans and ambitions were the constant concern of international diplomacy and the European news market. Yet Philip himself remained a rather mysterious presence, or, more correctly, absence, inscrutable and seldom seen. From the time of his return to Spain from the Netherlands in 1559 he never again left the peninsula. He spent the later decades of his reign at the newly built monastery palace El E
scorial, deliberately remote from Spain's major towns. From here he attempted to manage a foreign policy of sustained and unprecedented ambition.

  It is worth concluding our survey of the effectiveness of Europe's sixteenth-century news networks by contemplating the events of this period from Philip's perspective. For all Spain's military might, it remained during Philip's reign, as it had been in the previous two centuries, somewhat remote from the main European highways. The correspondence of medieval merchants had been mostly with the Mediterranean ports (especially Barcelona) not the Castilian interior. The rising power of Seville was, like Lisbon, orientated towards the Atlantic rather than main European trade routes. When Philip decided on Madrid as the main base of his operations, this required significant adjustments to the postal infrastructure. In 1560 a new ‘ordinary’ post was established between Madrid and Brussels. This passed by Burgos and Lesperon, and then through France via Poitiers, Orléans and Paris. When the king moved residence, in what became an increasingly fixed annual routine, the central administration remained in Madrid. Documents were brought to him in the Escorial or elsewhere by daily courier. The establishment of the ordinary post led to a great increase in the volume of mail and a commensurate reduction of cost; but it also meant that a great deal of routine diplomatic traffic was reaching Madrid by non-secure routes. This, and the normal hazards of postal communication, encouraged Spanish diplomats to adopt the prudent practice of sending duplicates of important despatches. On 15 August 1592 the king's ambassador in Savoy wrote to inform him: